Github lets you specify your agency context

Github gave me a whole new reason to love them last week when they introduced agency-aware identity in their new organizations offering. Crazy cool. Now each of my clients can have their own Github organization and I can participate in each! Same goes for each of my Open Source projects. And I can use it for a day job if I had such a thing. And all with one identity—one set of credentials. Brilliant Github!

by eyesplash Mikul (flickr)

I was going to tell you about Jonathan Ive’s recent pithy pronouncement on focus groups to wit:

“We don’t do focus groups,” he said firmly, explaining that they resulted in bland products designed not to offend anyone.

But I won’t do that because when I went to Wikipedia to research “focus group” for the post, I noticed that their page had already been updated with the Ive quote. It had been updated on the same day as the original BBC dot.life article. Wikipedia surprises me again with its velocity.

The Thought Propulsion™ corporate site is up and running. For the technically inclined, here are some interesting facts:

• hosted on Amazon EC2
• using the extremely slick EC2 On Rails Ubuntu/Ruby on Rails virtual appliance
• there’s a tasty microformatted hcard on the contact page (check it out with Operator)
• OpenID login (foreshadowing)

And of course a nice gray and orange theme just in time for Halloween.

The kind of openness promised by OpenSocial isn’t particularly valuable to users (oh that billion people.) Tim O’Reilly nails it with his economic analysis:

If all OpenSocial does is allow developers to port their applications more easily from one social network to another, that’s a big win for the developer, as they get to shop their application to users of every participating social network. But it provides little incremental value to the user, the real target. We don’t want to have the same application on multiple social networks. We want applications that can use data from multiple social networks.

It’s just an open widget API. Great. So as an app vendor my widget can kind of be portable. Or at least the back end code can kind of be reusable. But users still have no ability to combine the services of multiple vendors. This whole web platform wars thing has got to go.

At a deeper level, think about the value, or lack of value that the platforms actually provide. At the OpenSocial level the platforms are just providing widget containers. Portlets anyone? The Web experience is retrograde enough without taking a giant step backward and spending your whole day inside Facebook.

Rather than trying to suck Google/Yahoo!/Facebook/Microsoft’s sticky-locked-in version of the web through a lame portal straw, the real hope lies in innovative expansion of the browser-to-user link (as exemplified by Mozilla Prism which e.g. lets Web apps work much more like desktop ones) and in secure mashup technologies (like JSONrequest which turns the current platform-centric model on its head.)

update: Prism prototype now available for Mac and Linux.

Crockford takes us through a brief history of computing reminding us, as we’ve been reminded before, that the Web interaction model is practically the same as the mainframe 3270 interaction model circa 1972.

The most potent moment in the talk however, is when he shows a shot of a mermaid rendered via a run of the mill nvidia subsystem and dryly points out “look, rounded corners”. The upshot: the 1984 Macintosh had rounded corners — browsers were obsolete from the git go and there is a huge and widening gap between what you do in a web app and what you do in a non-web one.

Oh and I’m making Crockford my Personal Hero of the Month for pointing out that not only are our web technologies based on eight-year-old standards (HTML 4.0.1, ECMAscript ed. 3, CSS 3) started in ’98 and still under development but that of those, CSS is the worst of the lot and should be replaced with urgent haste. Refreshing respite from the usual CSS love.

“Don’t take any crap.”

update: watch this space for my growing list of web standards revolutionaries:

Actually I think there is an URL syntax that would work if I only knew the incantation. Wouldn’t it be nice if it was simply in the address bar of the browser?

A backlash is brewing against traditional thin-client web applications. Folks are tired of the beachball. Vendors of Web-based applications like Gmail, in which users spend a significant portion of their day, will respond by incorporating client-side persistence, offline operation and synchronization. In particular Gmail will add these features in 2007.

Well then a couple days ago (May 30, 2007), Google announced Google Gears , their toolkit for offline web apps (connection detection, offline operation, offline storage) and updated Reader with an offline mode. This thing is similar in purpose to Joyent’s Slingshot which went into Beta on the Mac on April 17, 2007.

It sure seems like the stage is set. Technology answers need. Only thing standing in the way might be competing priorities or strategic conflicts. Have to think about that a little bit.

You’ve heard of a “to do” list, well Joyomi manages your “to get” list. Joyomi highlights overdue stuff and helps you get it back. If you’ve lent a book to a friend, create a Book Omi and you’ll remember to ask for the book back next month.

Same idea for CDs and DVDs and money too. There’s a whole set of starter Omis. If you don’t find one that fits your purpose you can create a generic one.

Joyomi doesn’t just track your stuff it tracks your online conversations too. Use the Joyomi Bookmarklet to create Omi’s for important emails, blog comments and forum posts as well. With Joyomi you don’t have to remember to visit a bunch of sites—all the conversations are consolidated in one clean dashboard.

Once you’ve created an Omi it’s easy to share it with a friend. Nothing like those gentle reminders!

How long will it be before a complete IDE is delivered as a web application? To varying degrees, Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA are stuck on the same island that Smalltalk was. They’re all trying to be graphically rich and run on many platforms. They’re all expending lots of resources maintaining UI toolkits (think of Eclipse’s Rich Client Platform). And the resultant UI technology, while often innovative and sometimes pleasing, suffers a “credibility gap” when compared with platform-specific technology on the Mac or Windows. When will the IDE’s throw their weight behind the DHTML+AJAX crowd and embrace the “third platform”?

Well there is renewed hope – but it looks like Ruby and Rails may arrive before Squeak does. Gyre is an honest-to-goodness Ruby on Rails IDE delivered through the browser complete with source-level interactive debugging, project navigation, and an interesting syntax-aware text editor.

Seems like the next step is to get the Gyre folks working with the Firebug folks. Can you imagine it?

Date: Thursday, February 15, 2007 – 6:30PM-8:00PM
Location: Sabre Labs Room A-172. Which presumably means “don’t worry about it, just do the
obvious thing and follow the signs”
Expected Attendance: Small group, target 30 people?
Format: 4 x 5 Min Demos (5 min demo, 10 min Q&A/Discussions)